Generally, current implementations of wireless base stations use a combination of hardware accelerators, DSP (digital signal processor) and GPP (general purpose processor) cores. Turbo codes tend to be part of all current wireless standards, including LTE (Long Term Evolution), LTE-Advanced, HSPA (High Speed Packet Access) and WiMAX (Worldwide Interoperability for Microwave Access). Efficient implementation of turbo encoding and decoding is a challenge for software based implementations.
SIMD (single instruction, multiple data) processors typically exploit the parallelism inherent in the computations to accelerate processing. However, turbo-encoding is considered a difficult problem to implement in parallel due to the tight recursive nature inherent in computation.